Intermedial Borders and Global Fairy-Tale Cultures

Unlike other companions, such as the Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, which highlights the textured and complex histories of fairy tales and their retellings through time, and the Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, which takes an encyclopedic and historical view of the field and its critics, the Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures sits at the intersection of fairy-tale studies, media studies, and cultural studies. This Companion uses its positioning to draw these fields together in a dialogue that ultimately changes how we consider the cultural spaces in which these tales exist, how they are reclaimed and retold, and how contemporary transmediation of fairy tales might further open and expand current discourses about fairy tales in relation to new understandings of culture and media. Recent publishing—over the last five years in particular—has seen a rise in combining fairy-tale and folktale research with cultural studies, in-depth examinations of pop culture, and media studies (Bellas; Foster and Tolbert; Greenhill and Rudy; Rudy and Greenhill; Zipes et al.). This trend has not only opened new avenues through which to consider fairy-tale research across contemporary media, but also helped to widen the field to incorporate more global contexts, marginalized voices, and concerns regarding the contemporary adaptation and re-interpretation of various fairy-tale and folktale cultures. The seventy-two-chapter critical text encompasses an expansive range of views, examining media texts from around the world in ways that push at the boundaries of socio-historically rooted fairy-tale and folklore criticism in favour of considering the cultural implications of the return to this mode of storytelling across multiple media platforms in the contemporary age. These updates pertaining to contemporary concerns and cultural and media phenomena recognize that changes in media and culture have relocated the intersecting methods through which fairy tales are starting to be understood today.

The range of the text is extensive and ambitious; this Companion is not meant to be a simple survey or a beginner's primer on these topics; instead, the editors' stated goals are to "open … up" (xiv) these topics to new ways of thinking and thus, new ways of considering the field at large. Each chapter addresses the intersections of fairy tales, culture, and media from different angles or in relation to particular critical or contemporary political concerns. The topics themselves range from the expected, such as adaptation, orientalism, gender, and children's and young adult literature, to subjects that might be somewhat less expected, such as crime, fat studies, horror, mobile apps, and reality television. These latter topics illustrate that looking at fairy-tale studies in relation to changes in media and contemporary cultural concerns opens up new possibilities in the field and that these traditionally historically-located narratives have themselves become embedded in a new media landscape that requires more flexible thinking and conceptualization.

For a volume with so many wide-ranging areas of focus, the structure of the Companion makes it easy not only to research a particular topic, but also to browse and thereby discover routes in which to expand one's own thinking about what can possibly be considered a fairy tale. Rather than centring discourse related to national textual histories or the changes in socio-cultural positioning of different tales across a period of time or epochs in popular culture, the book is organized into five parts: "Basic Concepts," "Analytical Approaches," "Issues," "Communicative Media," and "Expressive Genres and Venues." This structure allows readers to understand the topics through an issues-based perspective that foregrounds transnational flows and inter- and intracultural dialogues. Particular attention is also paid to different forms of media and to genres within creative media. The first two parts ground the reader in the volume and provide some of the tools necessary to navigate the criticism in the further three parts. Most helpfully, especially for those potentially coming to this volume as a first look...